We recently heard the news that OMG Liverpool is closing its doors for the final time, as of Saturday 6th June, and it’s tempting to view it in isolation, just one venue, just one closure. But it isn’t isolated, and that’s what makes it so difficult to sit with.
OMG experimented over its eight years in the city, tried different things, different formats, different identities within the few venues the parent company owns. Dorothy’s Show Bar, Dorothy’s Diner. For whatever reason, those iterations didn’t quite land, and ultimately the venue is closing. You can acknowledge that honestly without it diminishing the loss, because the loss is real.
When you take stock of what we’d genuinely class as queer venues in Liverpool right now, the list is short. Lisbon, Masquerade, Superstar Boudoir, and upstairs at the Poste House. Heaven operates as an after-hours venue. The Haus of Fun complex caters largely for hen parties, and look, in this economy, you do what you have to do. And GBar, once a cornerstone of the scene, feels like a venue that has quietly drifted from the community it was built for.
That’s it. That’s the scene.
And here’s what makes that so stark. According to the 2021 UK Census, 123,367 people across the Liverpool City Region described their sexual orientation as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, queer, or other, a figure equivalent to the entire GLB population of San Francisco, one of the most recognisable LGBTQ+ cities on the planet. And yet our welcoming spaces are dwindling.
So what’s driving this? There are two conversations happening at once, and both are worth having.
The first is the broader reality of running a bar or club right now. The hospitality sector recorded two venue closures per day during the first nine months of 2025, driven by rising business rates, National Insurance contributions, energy bills that remain significantly higher than pre-crisis levels, and a cost-of-living squeeze that has made people more cautious about how and where they spend. These pressures don’t discriminate, and queer venues are often smaller, more independent, and without the financial cushion of a larger operator behind them, which makes them even more exposed.
The second conversation is harder, and more specific to us as a community. Are we actually giving new venues a chance? There’s something to be said for the fact that many of us are creatures of habit, and new spaces can open, struggle to build a loyal crowd quickly enough, and close before they’ve had the opportunity to become what they might have been. That’s definitely not an accusation of any sort, it is, however, a pattern worth reflecting on, and both things can be true at once.
What concerns me most is what this means for Liverpool’s so-called Pride Quarter. The rainbow adorned street signs are still there, but the spaces they were meant to represent are thinning out, with gentrification creeping in and bringing with it certain types of venues that don’t have our community’s safety or welcome at the centre of their offer. The physical geography of queerness in this city is shrinking, even as our population remains enormous.
And the ripple effects matter. Liverpool attracts a significant student population, and a meaningful proportion of those students are LGBTQ+. Will the absence of a genuine, thriving queer scene factor into where young queer people choose to study? Will we see fewer spaces for emerging drag performers and queer artists to develop their craft, with more people chasing the same shrinking number of residencies? These aren’t hypothetical questions, they’re the logical end point of the trajectory we’re on.
The honest answer to what we do about it is that there isn’t an easy one. Queer venues need to be queer owned, run by people who genuinely understand the community’s needs, its concerns, its safety. But the capital required to open and sustain a venue like that is significant, and very few queer individuals or organisations are in a position to take that on, particularly in this climate.
OMG Liverpool closing is not just a venue shutting its doors. It’s another light going out, and right now, we can’t afford to keep losing lights.